Theology and the Interpretation of Narrative: Some Hermeneutical Considerations

Abstract

Abstract For centuries the institutions of higher learning in Western culture were governed by the organization of learning into the study of the liberal arts—the trivium and quadrivium—and the study of specialized subjects, medicine, jurisprudence, and theology on top of them. The arrangement is a useful point of departure for looking at a longstanding ambiguity concerning the study of Christianity, the majority (should one say: the former majority?) religion of that culture. Christianity provided a vast yet simple narrative that in turn served to integrate a coherent view of truth, of the universe, of human nature and destiny—in fact of all things conceivable and inconceivable. That ambitious undertaking, strangely grown out of a small body of texts and a fragile tiny organization, has been the source of Christianity's grandeur and, in secular contexts, its misery. In omnibus undergraduate courses on Western civilization we still make a bow toward it by taking a look at selections from Thomas Aquinas: They represent the study of theology seen as the pinnacle of the structure of integrated knowledge, the queen of the sciences. Theology in that context is discourse about a concept, “God,” and the usual assumption has been that part of what the inquiry is about is whether or not or how the concept “refers.” On the one hand, then, theology has a generally accessible subject matter, broadly based both as a technical concept and as a wider cultural one, “God” and perhaps God, even if there may be arguments about distinctive conditions required to enable one to get into a position to study it. On this view, theology and philosophy are bound to be closely if perhaps oddly related, especially when philosophy is regarded not only as having its own contents (metaphysics, ontology, ethics, epistemology, anthropology, etc.) but in addition as being the “foundation” discipline providing all-fields-encompassing arguments and criteria for meaning and certainty, in the light of which philosophy arbitrates what may count as meaningful language, genuine thought, and real knowledge.